Engaging Shaw, one of my personal favorites, has been selected for a preliminary reading at Abingdon Theatre Company in Manhattan, on Monday, 23 February, at 7:00 p.m. The theater is located at 312 West 36th Street (between 8th & 9th Avenues). The reading is free to the public and there will be a discussion with me afterwards, during which I’m supposed to listen and not talk. I shall endeavor to practice restraint.
I don’t yet know who the director is, or who is in the cast, but I’ll post the information as soon as I hear anything. Abingdon doesn’t even have it on the website yet. They plan to post it after 26 January, but they’ve given me the okay to start promoting it here.
Some of you are very familiar with the play: it has been produced at Oldcastle Theatre Company (with Langdon Brown) and New Jersey Rep, and received readings at New Jersey Rep and the Kennedy Center. This will be its first exposure in New York (although The Times came to see it in New Jersey and declared it to be “Exactly the type of work that nonprofit theatres dedicated to producing new plays and musicals should be doing.”) My favorite review came from Variety, which called it “a spirited and intelligent combat of words and sparkling banter,” then attributed its authorship to someone named “John Mortimer Langdon.”
For those of you who are not familiar with it, Engaging Shaw is an unromantic, romantic comedy about the courtship of Bernard Shaw and Charlotte Payne-Townshend. The little slogan I wrote for the marketing department describes it like this: “He considered himself the superman. She allowed him to believe it.” Just enough wit to leave you incontinent.
Hope you can make it. It would be great fun to see friendly faces.
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